The Christmas Terror Attempt: Not 2001 All Over Again

When 23-year-old Nigerian Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab allegedly tried to blow up Northwest Flight 253 on Christmas Day, the reputed Islamic terrorist may well have chosen the date because of its Christian religious significance. Whatever the rationale for the timing, the near-tragedy in the skies over Michigan coincided with the sleepiest week of the 2009 news cycle. The predictable result was that camera-craving politicians and desperate-for-headlines TV anchors conspired to end the Anxious Aughts with a final burst of hysteria.

Please understand -- I am not dismissing the significance of any attempt airborne mass murder. It is obvious that serious low-level errors were made in not closely screening Abdulmutallab in Amsterdam, in not coordinating visa-denial lists with Britain and in not cross-checking anti-terrorist watch lists against foreign travelers with multiple-entry visas. Janet Napolitano, secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, also was rightly faulted for her politically maladroit (and later self-corrected) claim on the Sunday talk shows that "the system worked."

But this was not 2001 all over again, despite the alarmist rhetoric from vacationing legislators. On Fox News Sunday, Alabama Republican Sen. Richard Shelby, a former chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, declared with eerie chronological certainty, "This war is going to go on for 50 years. We better wake up again."

New York's Peter King, the senior Republican on the House Homeland Security Committee, was a man for all channels (he also wrote a quick "we need answers" op-ed for the New York Post) as he claimed on CNN Monday, "This came close to being one of the greatest tragedies in the history of our country. If we had lost 300 people on Christmas Day, this would have been remembered forevermore as the Christmas Day massacre."

It is a sadly unalterable truth that legislators waxing apocalyptic about epic tragedies and the coming Fifty Years War create more compelling television than administration officials carefully navigating vague talking points. On Meet the Press Sunday, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs kept repeating the phrase, "I don't want to get into classified intelligence matters." Napolitano was equally elusive on MSNBC Monday morning when asked whether Abdulmutallab has ties to al Qaeda, "I'm not able to comment on that at this time. That is part of the ongoing criminal investigation into this individual."

Terrorism, in all its macabre horror, is asymmetrical warfare designed to create the maximal bloodshed and havoc with minimal resources. The conventions of TV journalism (and to a lesser degree, newspapers) provide maximum exposure to those who inadvertently fan the flames of every terrorist incident. As King put it Sunday on Face the Nation, "This is a teaching moment, to use the president's term. And I believe that he . . . should be out there reminding the American people, saying this shows how deadly this enemy is."

A small question: Is there anyone in America who currently believes that al Qaeda consists of misunderstood pacifists?

When Barack Obama finally spoke to the nation from his Hawaiian vacation on Monday, he tried to project a mixture of firmness ("We will continue to use every element of our national power to disrupt, to dismantle and defeat the violent extremists who threaten us") and restraint ("The American people should remain vigilant, but also be confident").

For those conservatives preoccupied-occupied with obsessively counting the number of times that Obama utters the word "terrorism" as if such rhetorical measures are an index of presidential toughness, it is worth noting that the president referred to the incident aboard Flight 253 as an "attempted act of terrorism." To repeat: Obama directly called it "terrorism" and not, say, "an unauthorized attempt to interfere with the landing of a plane."

Amid the roiling partisanship of this mean-spirited decade, it is not surprising that Obama would be indirectly blamed for the failures of airport security and anti-terrorist list-making. This is not too much different than the way too many liberals unfairly blamed George W. Bush for the failure to anticipate the unimaginable Sept. 11 attacks.

The conservative editorial page of the Wall Street Journal sneered that "the jihadists don't seem to like Americans any better because we're closing down Guantanamo." All that is missing is a Dick Cheney speech claiming that al Qaeda was somehow emboldened by the return of the Democrats to the White House. As the Journal editorial put it, "Can we all now drop the pretense that we stopped fighting a war once Dick Cheney and George W. Bush left the White House?"

If this is indeed a war, then America's often maligned defenses on the home front deserve credit for a level of safety and security that seemed unimaginable in the frightened months after 9/11. And it is worth noting that many of these defenses were put in place during the Bush administration.

Statistics guru Nate Silver at his political blog FiveThirtyEight calculated the risks of American air travel since 2000: "The odds of being on given departure which is the subject of a terrorist incident have been 1 in 10,408,947 over the past decade." These calculations -- which include the September 11 attacks -- do give off a whiff of "Other than that Mrs. Lincoln, did you enjoy the play?" But for all the barefoot indignities of airport security, the jerry-built system up until Christmas Day had worked extremely well for eight years.

The novel "Up in the Air" by Walter Kirn had the misfortune to be published during the innocent summer of 2001. The story of a traveling businessman obsessed with the homogenized joys of impersonal airports and frequent-flier mileage seemed as historically outmoded as "War and Peace" as soon as 19 terrorists on Sept. 11 turned passenger jets into airborne missiles. The success of the movie version with George Clooney -- and the idea that the novel's central conceit was still relevant in 2009 -- is a symbol of how far we have come since the "world will never be the same" grief of 2001. That reality cannot be erased by a few gut-wrenching minutes on Christmas Day as Flight 253 from Amsterdam landed in Detroit.